There has been an overall heightened awareness of sanitation conditions in community bathrooms in recent times. Specifically, due to the existence of many communicable diseases, there has been interest in ensuring the sanitary and clean conditions of all toilet seats, and such seats as are found in community bathrooms in particular.
Accordingly, there have been many proposals for maintaining sanitary conditions for such devices. For example, systems such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,063,316 are intended to clean and disinfect toilet seats. However, such systems, while somewhat successful, have several drawbacks which prevent them from gaining widespread acceptance.
Specifically, systems, such as the just-mentioned patented system, accomplish their objectives by spraying a fluid over the toilet seat from outlets in that seat. This can be a messy operation in which liquid splashes out of the toilet and onto the floor and other adjacent fixtures. Still further, even after being cleaned, the seats in such systems are still exposed to the air and possible airborne germs which can defeat or vitiate at least some of the gained cleaning objectives of the system.
Still further, systems, such as the just-mentioned patented system, which use a plurality of fluids, such as liquid and gas, are subject to co-mingling of such fluids in the sources thereby raising the possibility of damaging the systems associated with the individual fluids.
Accordingly, there is a need for a toilet seat cleaning system which achieves the objective of cleaning, sanitizing and sterilizing a toilet seat in a neat manner and which protects a cleaned seat from contamination between uses.